Outdoor Discoveries

It wasn’t all sunshine

From Friday’s weather, hopes for clear blue skies, unimpeded sunshine and crisp frosty air were building, but a look at weather maps confounded those aspirations somewhat. The lesson is that an anticyclone’s ability to pull in cloud should not be underestimated and it was to come quite far west too. In circumstances like these, it is too easy to let the effect of realities on dreams stymie enthusiasm for outdoor activities but, not being in a mood to waste whatever the weekend might offer, I was out and about in Cheshire and Derbyshire.

In truth, I did play with the notion of heading to Wales, but that wasn’t to be and I stayed local on Saturday to mend a bicycle wheel puncture and then test it out. You may be thinking that puncture repair testing wouldn’t take me far but I was out for a few hours with the fallback that there were enough hours of daylight to walk the thing home if needed. There was some walking along the way, but the cause was a diversion over steep hills and not my failing to remove a thorn or a similarly undesirable object from a tyre. There was a reward for my risk taking in the form of the dissipation of cloud cover to reveal pleasingly lit hill country. It was just as well that I was out to enjoy it, then.

Sunday was to see me spend an afternoon walking from Edale to Hope, a station to station yomp over the Great Ridge from Mam Tor to Lose Hill (or Losehill Pike as the National Trust names it on their signs; there’s also the label of Ward’s Piece too but I am as yet unsure of the origins of that name). With Sunday having a verbatim start to Saturday, I was displaying signs of cold feet about the planned venture but lured myself out anyway. As it turned out, I would have been forgiven for having those doubts given that my Derbyshire amble was set to meet with rain. By then, my hand was turned to the proverbial plough so I got on with enjoying the walk, a task that was helped by there being some spotty sunshine before the rain that had brought some photographic satisfaction my way. All felt good.